Food Blogging Traffic & Income Report – December 2017

Food Blogging Traffic & Income Report for December 2017. Watch over my shoulder as I show you how to increase traffic and improve your income on your food blog.

If you’re new to RecipeThis.com, you may be wondering why I publish my income reports each month. Well the truth is that I have been publishing income reports on my blogs now for 5 years and it helps me stay accountable for what I do.

As well as this I always find that a lot of income reports are known because of the high traffic volumes and the high income figures. Therefore, when we started our food blog we did them from month 1. Sharing exactly what traffic we got in the first month, right through to the current month.

It keeps it REAL and allows you to see a natural growth on a food blog, rather than thinking how on earth am I ever going to start a food blog and make that kind of money or traffic!

Here is our traffic growth on our food blog from day 1 until now:

It may sound crazy, but the content I look forward to writing the most each month is my income report. It is my reflection of everything I have got up to, then if I am having a dreadful day, it’s a great way to look back and see what we have achieved.

How To Start A Food Blog

Would you like to join me and be a full-time food blogger too? Would you like to take photos of your delicious food, talk and breathe food like I do?

Then check out our free guide showing you how to start a food blog:

Or get the PDF version and be part of my how to start a food blog newsletter and always be in the loop when I share new food blogging tips and stories:

Food Blogging: Promoting In Demand Content

I saw a post on Facebook on Thanksgiving. Basically, it was from a lady that didn’t promote her content through Thanksgiving as she didn’t know how, or whether her readers would like it if she started advertising her old themed content.

While the rest of the food blogging world were mass-producing content, and doing promotions because people are so into Thanksgiving and of course the Black Friday deals she had made NOTHING.

What I wanted to do was to share with you our own food blogging campaign, so that if you are one of those that doesn’t get yourself out there it will give you a starting idea.

We had a week of specific content for the week of Black Friday. It included these posts:

Each of these posts were related to the Instant Pot which we were promoting via Black Friday. It received more than 2500 social shares, went viral on Facebook, received more than 50,000 page views and gave me some affiliate commissions too.

As well as this I re-promoted my most viral blog post that we have on RecipeThis.com. It is on topic and talks about the best beginner recipes for the Instant Pot. You see everyone that is buying a new Instant Pot in the Black Friday deals needs beginner recipes.

It was already on about 190,000 social shares and took it to over 225,000 shares in just a couple of days.

Here is the post as it went on Facebook:

Then here are the results:

Remember at the time of doing this I only had 9000 FB likes and we all know they give pages a terrible reach. Yet here I am with a 105,000 reach from one post with 381 shares and 17 people tagging their friends.

We simply shared it to 4 Facebook Groups about Instant Pot cooking. Relevant people that were looking right now for Instant Pot recipes.

It really was that simple. It took us less than 5 minutes to do this promotion. We then did the exact same thing for Christmas. After all Christmas is like the dream market for kitchen gadget bloggers like myself. You see people get these gadgets for Christmas gifts and are practically begging you for recipe ideas. Which naturally, I was ready to help out.

So, we put it out on our blog again for Christmas and had it go live on our Facebook account on Christmas Day and then shared it the day after.

If you look below here is the bump in traffic from just ONE blog post shared at 2 different times to FB groups:

This is a classic system of creating content for a specific foodie season and then taking content that has ALREADY done well and repromoting it. You will also see that it is doing better a week after the event than it was doing before.

Nothing hard.

Just think about your audience and think about a specific day when you can get the best results. Create additional content around the date and repromote old content too.

Just imagine if you had a piece of content for each major foodie event and that each time you repromoted the content. That Valentines post that you did 2 years ago, that you can bring back out every year and use it as a great way to get new social shares and new followers, along with affiliate commissions like we did.

I should also mention that my 101 Instant Pot Recipes post took me a long time to produce. It was several days’ work and I want to keep getting traffic and income from this post. So, if you put lots of time into each of your posts like I do, don’t leave them sat there in your food blog archives, make use of them.

My Instant Pot Recipes post has received over 400,000 page views since its debut and this was the reach it had over Christmas:

Plus, it has not calmed down and as of today (2nd of January it is still getting a lot of attention.

Over the last week in December it has received on Facebook:

23,890 shares

Nearly 800 likes

2.6 million reach

1000’s of comments

Best of all the majority of comments was people tagging their friends. This allowed the post to constantly stay alive and be in peoples feeds all the time. It has also put new subscribers on my mailing list and helped with my ebook sales.

This leads to a total food blogging income from Recipe This For December 2017 of $7653.17

Of course, you’re probably thinking that is a huge food blogging income for a site that is just over 2 years old. Well we don’t include all expenses, just expenses for the average food blogger that you can relate to.

It doesn’t include exchange rates as everything pays in dollars and has to be paid to us in Euros. Social security, business insurances, tax, petrol going to buy groceries to make recipes with (we live in the countryside) or our accountants fees. This food blogging income is out households only income, but on Portuguese money this puts us in the category of living to our means. So not on the poverty line, but trying to stay afloat.

No Sponsored Content

You are probably wondering why there is no sponsored content income, especially considering we are known for this income and this being our biggest income stream….well the truth is we will often book a couple of months at a time and then stop looking and that way we have breaks in our workload to breathe again.

As I write this in early January we are just filling up our spots for January and are looking for sponsors for February and March.

But it is nice to see without sponsored content that we are close to last months income with it. That is nice. Because it shouts out passive income rather than just income that has taken up a lot of our time.

Also, it is common in the blogging world for advertising networks to pay more at the end of quarter 4 and I am sure come quarter 1 I will be crying into my low income.

Other Income Changes

You will also notice that we are now on Monumetric. This was a change made mid November so December is our first full month with them. So far we are loving it and it has taken us a while to jump on board with them. After a bad experience with Mediavine it has been hard to try again, but we did, and we have now left Adsense.

On another note, we are starting our work on our ebooks and as such have dusted down our Clickbank account and we will soon be going through the process of setting up a sales funnel. This is something that we did many years ago and its like going back to basics.

Recipe This Blog Traffic December 2017

I love seeing my traffic grow. I love to see my SEO positions improving and I love seeing my social media grow. Well they have all grown in the same month. This led to what I am calling mega December.

It was so mega that we had a 60% traffic increase in December compared to November. Now that is like something out of your dreams. It is like Google wished us Happy Christmas and pushed us up the SERPS.

Here is our traffic for December 2017:

Here are our top 10 traffic sources for RecipeThis.com during December:

Normally what we see at the top is Google Search but this month it was led by our viral Facebook traffic, followed by Pinterest and then Google.

Here is our SEO traffic from Google Webmaster Tools account:

OMG I can’t believe how much SEO changed. From an average of 4000 clicks to an average of 12,000 clicks just like that. No warning, no new posts that got SEO, just old regular ones that come back time and time again and give me a buzz.

What’s Next?

2018 is here. It is finally HERE and we are pleased to announce the new theme on our food blog, that we have been talking about for months and months. It is Mrs Beeton (you can read the announcement here) and basically we are dedicating at least a year to old school cooking and frugal family meals. Along with some meal planning thrown in too.

We love the idea of doing themes on our blog. We normally do one for a month, but never a year! So here it is, for the world to see!

I have noticed a lot of other food blogs have been following my ideas for a month long campaign on a particular topic, so I thought I better step it up a level and do a whole year.

This Mrs Beeton blogging calendar is a lot of work, so we will also be on our new blogging calendar of one post every other day, instead of daily.

Monumetric ads are showing because we still get paid per 1000 not ppc, if you are viewing from countries that do not have majority english speaking the ads that are shown are very different to people in USA, UK, Australia and Canada. Like you we live in a majority non speaking english country and we see ads like you as they fill with google ads. Most of the premium advertisers with monumetric target the english speaking countries.

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We’re The Milners

Hello we’re the Milners and we run RecipeThis.com from our country cottage in Southern Portugal. The Milners is made up of husband and wife duo Dominic & Samantha along with their kids Kyle, Sofia & Jorge. They love cooking with local Mediterranean ingredients and are addicted to chocolate. If they could cook for the rest of their lives with just kitchen gadgets then they would!